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History: Ethereum Timeline
Vitalik Buterin described Ethereum as a concept in a White Paper in late 2013. This concept was developed by Dr. Gavin Wood who eventually published a technical Yellow Paper in April 2014. Since then, the development of Ethereum has been managed by a community of developers.

A crowdsale to fund development took place in July and August 2014, and the blockchain was went live on 30 July 2015.

Ethereum crowdsale
The development team was funded by an online sale of ETH tokens during July to August 2014 where people could buy ETH tokens by paying in Bitcoin, at an initial fixed rate of 2000 ETH for 1 BTC (currently in Oct 2016 1 BTC will buy you 50 ETH on the open market).

Crowdsale participants sent bitcoins to a bitcoin address and received a wallet containing the number of ETH bought. Technical details are on Ethereum’s blog https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/07/22/launching-the-ether-sale/

A little over 60m ETH was sold this way for a little over 31,500 BTC, worth about US$18m at the time. An additional 20% (12m ETH) were created to fund development and the Ethereum Foundation.

Software Release codenames: Frontier / Homestead / Metropolis / Serenity
These are friendly names for versions of the core Ethereum software, a little like Apple’s OS X version names such as Mavericks, El Capitan, Sierra.

Olympic (testnet): Launched May 2015 – a testing release where coins are not compatible with ‘real’ ETH. A testnet still runs in parallel to the main live network so that developers can test their code.
Frontier: Launched 30 July 2015 – an initial live release with a way for people to mine ETH and build and run contracts.
Homestead: Launched 14 March 2016 – some protocol changes, more stability.
Metropolis: Future launch – moving from command-line to graphical interfaces.
Serenity: Future launch – moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Stake (Casper).